Mikulski to lead diminished Senate Appropriations Committee

With its late Chairman Daniel Inouye lying in state in the Rotunda Thursday, these are not happy times for the proud Senate Appropriations Committee.

White House budget talks have eclipsed its mission, earmarks are verboten, not one of its annual bills has passed this year, and a $60.4 billion emergency disaster aid package for Hurricane Sandy risks the same fate this week. In a matter of hours Wednesday, not one but two senior Democrats turned down the chance to replace Inouye in a post that was once among the most coveted in Congress.

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But when the call came, Sen. Barbara Mikulski grabbed the brass ring with no hesitation, and this sawed-off shotgun from Baltimore may be just what the doctor ordered. “She seemed seven feet tall,” said one who watched her get the news. And on the floor that afternoon, the incoming chairwoman gave no quarter when Sen. Tom Coburn (R-Okla.) challenged money she had added to the Sandy bill to help distressed fisheries designated as disasters by the Commerce Department.

The senator from Oklahoma “has said on many occasions that he has been the defendant of the taxpayer. Well, so am I,” Mikulski said. “Let’s get rid of this phony-baloney nonsense that somehow or another that would undermine this bill.”

“Visibility, vitality and vision, you heard it from me,” she laughed in a brief hallway interview Thursday. “This committee is constitutionally mandated,” Mikulski told POLITICO, and she wants to see Appropriations restored as one of the “big three economic committees” in the Senate alongside Finance and Budget.

“To use an Orioles analogy,” she said, “I’ve been in the dugout for a long time, but I’m now ready to go the full nine innings.”

“If anyone can help revive the Appropriations Committee, Barbara Mikulski can do it,” Sen. Tom Harkin (D-Iowa) told POLITICO. But his own choice to not take the post — and instead chair the Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee — is a reminder of how much the Senate has changed. And because Appropriations is so central to the operations of Congress, no committee has paid a heavier price for the dysfunction of the past few years.

In fact, Inouye’s death on Monday came a year to the day after the Senate gave final approval to the last great appropriations bill on Dec. 17, 2011, implementing the promise of the Budget Control Act adopted in the summer four months before.

The Hawaii Democrat and his counterpart, House Appropriations Committee Chairman Hal Rogers (R-Ky.), had every reason to expect then that they would be able to move their bills in compliance with the Budget Control Act caps again in 2012. And the leadership even talked of moving bills in January, before the president’s budget had been submitted.

But all this changed within months. And to appease his right and advance a House budget resolution that ultimately went nowhere, Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) walked away from the agreement and demanded tens of billions in new domestic spending cuts — which threw a monkey wrench into the whole process.